Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

The discount factor for profiting from tyranny

A recent report in the Financial Times, and others, can be argued as a strong indicator of American commitment to the 'values' their politicians are so fond of talking about:

"Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words 'democracy' and 'freedom' from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors."

Business responds with commentary including:

"Censorship puts all information businesses at risk [...] That risk, translated into commercial terms, represents a discount factor."

That's right - a 'discount factor', not an abuse of fundamental rights. Indeed, the US government-run Radio Free Asia reports meekly that:

"Major search engines, service providers and technology companies - including U.S.-based Yahoo!, Cisco and Microsoft - have already been criticized by advocates of free speech online for cooperating with Beijing to censor 'bad' words like 'democracy' and 'Taiwan independence' and to block content which the government doesn't like from users in China."

Presumably to RFA that the critics are therefore insubstantial and easily dismissed. It would seem that there is a world of difference between the 'democracy' that 'advocates of free speech online' are concerned to achieve, and the 'democracy' that politicians love to talk so much about. Indeed, one may extrapolate that for corporations like Microsoft, notions of Democracy are secondary to the ability to profit from tyrannical regimes. Some coverage also mentions that anti-censorship activists have discovered that if the blog is created in English, it bypasses the filtering, even if the language is later switched to Chinese - a bug or a feature, Microsoft?

Item posted by AutoEditor at 3:18 pm ::